Arelys García Acosta and the humility of journalism with faces

SANCTI SPIRITUS, Cuba, Mar 14 (ACN) When Arelys García Acosta caresses in her hands the Tomás Álvarez de los Ríos Provincial Lifetime Achievement Award, conferred as part of the activities for the Cuban Press Day in the province of Sancti Spíritus, the memories of the radio broadcaster go back clear and diaphanous to her first steps in the profession.

“It all began more than three decades ago with the Radio 8SF station in the mountains of eastern Cuba, where a singular scenario and a unique environment for creation caught me,” she recalls from the city where she has lived for several years and where she has earned everyone’s affection and admiration. “I was welcomed by a very professional crew when I was fresh out of the University of Oriente as a philologist, and from them I learned about the human side of radio work and news coverage.”

Since then, chronicles, reports, testimonies, interviews and other journalistic genres fed both from Arelys’s perseverance and professional quality and from her tenderness, objectivity, sensitivity and humanism as a person.

More than 150 awards in provincial and national contests bear testimony to the excellence of her work during an international mission in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

“It was a real school,” she pointed out, “considering the conditions to work in the field, be it in communities on the shores of the Orinoco River or cities hosting major political and social events.

Her work also boasts interviews with relatives of the Cuban Five, the heroes unjustly imprisoned in the United States, with women who were tortured by Luis Posada Carriles in Venezuela, and of doctors, scientists, peasants, coal miners and other protagonists of contemporary developments.

“I was lucky to have by my side since day one an excellent journalist like Enrique Ojito Linares, my husband, with whom I started a family and who is also my best teacher,” she remarked.

She holds that the Tomás Álvarez de los Ríos Lifetime Achievement Award gives her endless energy and oxygen to do her professional work and, she says, it is also a gift to her mother, who managed to guide the lives of her three children.

“I can tell you for sure that journalism seduces and enamors me permanently, that I still have many life stories to discover and share, and that every piece of work that I give to the listeners or readers will bear the face of how and what I learned and points the way for me in this profession,” she concluded.